The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing today with executives from the country’s largest pharmaceutical distribution corporations. They wanted answers to some pretty basic questions, like why did they ship “12.3 million doses of powerful prescription opioids to the Family Discount Pharmacy in Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va., from 2006 to 2014”? According to the 2010 census, Mount Gay-Shamrock has under 1,800 residents. In fact, this wasn’t an isolated incident.
A single pharmacy in Kermit, W. Va., a town of about 400 people, received nearly 9 million hydrocodone pills over two years.
“There is no logical explanation we can find for why a town of approximately 400 people would receive nearly 9 million opioid pills in two years,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Pulling out my calculator, that’s nine million pills for four hundred people, which equals 22,500 pills per person. This was over the course of two years, so that’s 11,250 opioid pills per person per year. That comes out to thirty-one pills per person per day.
The results for the people of West Virginia are as stark as they are obvious.
In 2016, West Virginia had the highest rate of opioid-related overdose deaths in the United States―a rate of 43.4 deaths per 100,000―and up from a low 1.8 deaths per 100,000 in 1999. The number of overdose deaths peaked at 733 deaths in 2016 with the majority of deaths attributed to synthetic opioids and heroin. Since 2010, deaths related to synthetic opioid deaths quadrupled from 102 to 435 deaths and deaths related to heroin rose from 28 to 235 deaths.
These executives are reluctant to take any blame for this.
Each executive said their companies have taken steps to prevent the diversion of drugs and to help fight the opioid crisis. They argued that their companies do not manufacture or prescribe drugs; they fulfill orders from pharmacies. Distributors, they argue, are not responsible for overprescribing medications. The companies also say that opioid painkillers account for a small portion of their overall business.
“As an intermediary in the pharmaceutical supply chain, Cardinal Health does not ultimately control either the supply of or the demand for opioids,” [Cardinal Health Executive Chairman George] Barrett said.
I don’t agree with Republican Rep. David McKinley about much, but I agree with him here:
“I am so frustrated for the people in West Virginia and across this country that you all have not … stepped up and took more responsibility for this,” said Rep. David B. McKinley (R-W. Va.), his voice rising. “The fury inside me right now is bubbling over.”
If the opioid crisis hasn’t hit your family or your community in a way that has forced you to get involved in seeing the carnage up close and personal, your fury may not be bubbling over about this. Count yourself lucky, but you shouldn’t be complacent because this crisis knows no boundaries and respects no one.
During the whole course of the crisis, West Virginia has been drifting further and further to the right. Today the state’s voters may nominate a man to be their senator who is most famous for running a mine that didn’t follow safety regulations, exploded, and left twenty-nine coal miners dead. He seems to many like a better option than mainstream Republicans and certainly any Democrats.
This is what happens when you poison an entire state with lethal pharmaceuticals and then do nothing about the problems it creates. People lose faith in both parties and start looking for magical solutions, like Trump or Blankenship.
A professor of Chemistry I know has been so thoroughly emotionally conditioned by the GOP and its media that his position is ‘burn it all down!”.
Mindless anger will keep the base enthusiastically voting to harm us all, while the mega-rich prosper and opioid treatment is cut. Sad and infuriating.
I’m sure no one asked Pharma why they seem to be able to develop an effective flu vaccine. They can’t even develop effect meds to ease the symptoms of the flu.
Could the Congressman’s fury be bubbling over at least in part because he’s not getting a sufficient cut of the take? The rank of “Pharmaceuticals/Health Products” among his industrial contributors is currently #8. (“Health Professionals”–presumably including the “providers” who prescribe the drugs–is #1.)
There is not a single congresscritter who is not on the take from corporate entities. Not a one. Some choose their poisons better than others, but dollar for dollar the money is just as effective…if used well in a political manner…no matter what its source may be.
This particular congresscritter?
He is of course free to refuse money from these obvious drug dealers, but he won’t. Why? Because he’ll lose his gig, that’s why. His rising fury ain’t that bubbly. Bet on it. Got a mortgage to pay, cars to buy and a family to cosset. Bet on that as well.
The rot is so deep in DC!!!
AG
Facts. What are they good for, again?
Facts?
Define your terms.
What is a “fact?”
In this situation.
If a “fact” cannot conclusively be proven to be factual…as is the case so far with so much of this foofaraw…then it is simply more propaganda.
And may the best propagandists win.
Meanwhile…any sort of real truth circles the drain.
So it goes.
Straight down the tubes.
Later…
AG
Ya know, instances actually occur in which it’s quite reasonable to question whether something stated as fact or asserted to be fact or labeled “fact” is, in fact, fact. Plenty of them. Far too many of them. For one very obvious, relevant example: lying that ‘HRC impli[ed] that working class whites are “deplorables.”‘
Citing opensecrets.org for the facts that
. . . is, quite obviously, not such an instance.
Making your idiotic demand for a definition of “fact” that these facts conform to completely superfluous (I’d say diversionary, but I find it impossible to imagine what you could possibly imagine this might successfully divert attention from!) — since they conform to any reasonable definition of “fact” — and, yes, astonishingly stupid. Even for you.
You write that I am:
Fact:
Hillary Clinton said:
Fact…observable fact if you pay even cursory attention to the people who attend Trump’s rallies:
Fact:
HRC threw half of Trump’s supporters into a basket labelled “Deplorables” when she said that. The “just be grossly generalistic” line was an attempt…a failed attempt, given the following results… to excuse herself from what she was about to say.
A lie?
No.
Simply the plain truth of the matter.
Trump’s campaign immediately seized on this mistake.
And…big fact:
Donald Trump…not Hillary Clinton…is now the president of he United States.
That “deplorables” line…given at an ” LGBT for Hillary gala”, by the way, a fact that Trump’s handlers (perhaps erring on the side of caution) did not emphasize…plus her “public position/private position” gaffe (which was supposed to remain “private” because it was given in the company of her Wall Street supporters but was instead leaked from a Podesta email by Wikileaks) were major mistakes that negatively affected her campaign.
I believe that you mentioned somewhere that you live in Montana, right? (Correct me if I’m wrong…I know that it gives you great pleasure to do so and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.), and that you are somehow involved in some sort of wildlife research.
You must come into contact with Trump supporters in your line of work in a state that went for Trump and in the necessarily “rural” areas in which most wildlife research is done.
Do you support that “…you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” quote or do you not?
I don’t, and I am often in contact with that level of our society…both intimate and casual contact. Sure, there are massively prejudiced assholes out there in that culture, but “half?”
Not even close.
Are you not in some way being a “deplorable” yourself by throwing all of these people in that nasty basket?
As was HRC?
Inquiring minds want to know.
AG
Now a standalone article. Did HRC Imply That “Half of Trump’s Supporters” Are Deplorables Or Not? You Be the Judge.
Comment there if you have something to say.
Or even if you don’t.
Your choice.
Later…
AG
. . . substituting “half of Trump’s supporters” in place of “working class whites”.
Truly breathtaking dishonesty.
. . . you are. A stupid, dishonest complete waste of space and time.
First, you stupidly choose statement of uncontroversial, undisputed facts as an occasion to question the meaning of “fact” and demand a definition for it.
When it’s pointed out to you how stupid that is, you revert to trying hand-waving, obfuscating blather (at 2-3X your previous length, but it’s still all the same stupid, evasive, diversionary shit) to pretend that your previously thoroughly, definitively refuted false claim hasn’t already been thoroughly, definitively refuted. And you do this by repeating the same stupid, evasive, diversionary shit that’s already thoroughly, definitively refuted.
Clinton did not ‘impl[y] that working class whites are “deplorables” as you lied that she had. That’s a fact. Her own actual, verbatim words in their full context demonstrate this definitively. No amount of dishonest, diversionary blather from you can change — or hide — that fact.
They’re drug dealers and should be treated accordingly.
. . . word choice was completely conscious and deliberate.
Sorry, FoxNews is a more damaging toxin in places like WV….and it has been broadcasting on basic cable across the state, in every living room, or place of business with a TV unchecked for 20 years.
Their 8 years of the bullshit “WAR ON COAL!” has a population siding with someone who murdered 28 of their own supposedly sacred coal miners. The same people whose voting records the last few decades allowed their unions to get busted, their streams poisoned, and outside corporate entities flood them with drugs.
I won’t even get into the media’s timing on “discovering” the opioid crisis in 2016 and resulting “Oh, won’t SOMEONE help our forgotten (tacitly meaning by Democrats, of course) glorious white working class in crisis!” reach arounds that WV (and much of conservative white America) have clung to excuse what is just hate, fear, bigotry stoked by a right wing propaganda machine.
Their 8 years of the bullshit “WAR ON COAL!” has a population siding with someone who murdered 28 of their own supposedly sacred coal miners. The same people whose voting records the last few decades allowed their unions to get busted, their streams poisoned, and outside corporate entities flood them with drugs.
And Joe Manchin is what? A GOPer in all but name. And I think those of us here know how evil his daughter is as well. So WV doesn’t have much of a choice at the moment.